Chapter 27

I woke up around 10. Weirdly enough there were no loud explosions today. I assume that the superstitious manure-shovelers don’t want to waste their fireworks and will wait for the weekend, when they can disturb as many people as possible. We were out of water, the tap water in China is not drinkable so we get 20-liter bottles delivered, and it hadn’t arrived yet. So I couldn’t really hydrate my hungover brain properly, there was a thermos of hot water by the bed but I had to wait a bit before sipping it.

I chatted with an Australian friend on Facebook. He said that it’s Australia Day, the commemoration of the arrival of a British fleet in 1788, and of course some SJWs want to erase such a holiday and its celebration of colonialism. In Quebec, and I assume elsewhere in Trudeaustan, you similarly have people who constantly apologize for being on "unceded Native American land". The whole thing is so wrong on so many levels. Even if it was ceded by a treaty, ceded by whom? Some local chieftain who himself "stole" the land from the tribe who was there before? And it shows a flawed understanding of history, how my French settler ancestors worked for generations to turn patches of forest into arable lands, established trade routes, and formed alliances with the Natives that spanned centuries, to the point that those guys fought alongside the French in all their wars against the redcoat-wearing evil Britcunts. And more importantly, what do you wish to fucken achieve by uttering that empty sentence, aside from virtue-signaling? How does it address or begin to solve the problems experienced by the Native American communities in the 21st century?

Well to play devil's advocate, from what I understand of their nomadic cultures, the fact that nobody owns land also means, conversely, that everybody owns it. So the 17^th French dude who got discharged from his service in the colonial army and given a patch of land as per the contract agreed upon will spend all his life removing roots and rocks from near-frozen land, build a cabin, plant potatoes, and not let people go through. So of course some Natives might go "WTF m8?"

But again, most of New France aside from the river valley and the parts near the sea was a vast expanse with a few forts and trading centers. The Indians were our allies. They didn't even think of the French settlers and traders as "colonial oppressors" for the most part, that idea wasn't in their reality like, say, inhabitants from India who were already in a settled society where all of a sudden the leaders are from elsewhere. Paleolithic, constantly warring Native Americans thought of the world as a bunch of hostile and allied tribes, and all of a sudden another nomadic tribe, but with strange-colored hair and boom-boom-sticks, turned up and they all went "hey maybe we can ally with those guys against the evil bullying Iroquois who come to raid our shit". And likewise, the British with their more permanent, agricultural, settled colony allied with the sedentary Iroquois.

And it goes without saying that American Indians and Australian Aboriginals got buttfucked through unfair treaties, although those that are relevant to the current at-times dismal situation have little to do with the early colonial era, but rather modern governments and their avarice. And also a lack of good leadership and a toxic culture, but we can't mention this, because after all we're supposed to infantilize the fuck out of them and absolve them from personal responsibility, y'know. Some parts of Indigenous Canada and USA are truly third-worldy, and I've seen with my eyes (albeit in a very limited manner) how sad the Aboriginal situation is in Stroya. I don't know what the solution is, but for fucken sure making a bunch of empty condescending gestures isn't a part of it, nor is hopping in a time machine.

Those are my off-the-cuff thoughts on the matter. Of course I could elaborate, as a history buff with a pretty damn extensive knowledge of New France/Lower Canada/Quebec history.

I listened to a live set by Rotting Christ, a Greek band categorized as black metal but with a pretty special sound, mid-tempo and very melodic. Then I put the leash on the dog and we went out, I rode my bicycle and he ran along like the predator of the great plains that he is. I stopped at the bike shop to fix the loose stand, as I don’t have that caliber of Allen key at home, and I oiled my chain. Then for the reminder of the ride I put the dog in the basket and we went to Subway. I love Subway, but I seldom go, as my city’s only franchise of the sandwich chain is in a shopping mall a bit far away, in a part of town I don’t go to often. My first time going to a Chinese Subway was more than twelve years ago, when I left the small impoverished central Chinese city I was living in at the time and took an overnight train to Shanghai, where I binged on all the non-Chinese food I couldn’t get back in the boonies. I remember how it was creepily the exact same thing as a Subway shop in Quebec, down to the distinctive smell, aside from the language spoken of course. It can be a bit hard to order Subway for many foreigners in China, as it requires a bit more communication than other fast-food chains, and the 2008 version of me barely managed.

I had a footlong on parmesan bread, half ham and half Italian cold cuts. They didn’t have olives, the girl said that too few people were asking for them and they would go to waste. Chinese people don’t like olives. I ate outside, feeding little morsels of deli meat to my triangle-faced companion. The weather was pretty nice, yesterday it rained and cleared out the smog a bit.

I stopped at the little market to buy meat and vegetables to make a gumbo. I browned duck legs, then made a dark roux with the rendered fat and a few swigs of oil, and then added chicken broth to make some kind of gravy. I removed that from the pan and put it in the slow cooker, and then browned some slices of sausage that I imagine will be an acceptable substitute for Cajun andouille, and sweat the holy trinity of onion, celery and peppers, along with a pinch of thyme, several cracks of fressshhhhly ground black pepper and a bay leaf. I mixed everything and simmered it for a few hours, occasionally stirring, and added shrimp after a while.

All the while I listened to an album by Grima, a Russian atmospheric black metal project. Just like Panopticon the day before, they integrate some folkloric elements, and being from the great frozen Siberian taiga, their instrument of choice is the accordion. A good discovery, I’ll check out the rest of their discography.

I had slept only about 6 hours, so I felt a bit tired and still a bit hungover. I laid in bed playing a bit of GTA IV and then had a long nap.

I was just ready to leave to go play soccer when there was a knock on the door. Four women wearing coats from some municipal government body were there to ask how many people live here, and check the expiration date on our fire extinguishers. They were a bit confused by my presence initially, I should have pretended I can’t understand Chinese to have a laugh.

We had three teams of six and played 10-minute games, rotating. It was good fun but I came out with a few more bumps and bruises than usual: a twisted ankle from blocking a point blank powerful kick, a deflected ball that hit me right in the eyebrow, and I fell hard on my tailbone at some point. But like Gloria Gaynor, I will survive. I rode back home on cycling paths and deserted roads, opened a 1-L bottle of homebrew, and took a bath. The water was so hot I got in slowly, and was sweating profusely as I was lying there nursing my sore limbs. I took a cold shower to rinse off and fixed myself a plate of gumbo with white rice, it was delicious. I watched the 7 Jours Sur Terre weekly news show on YouTube, I see these guys going far, with their quality journalism.